Everyone needs closure. Some more than others.For me, it’s been a very long journey that started with a simple idea: Why do people fall out of love? How can two people, who think the world of one another, suddenly want nothing but that world to end. How does the process start… at what point does that process start? Like every film I’ve ever done, Closurestarted as something I was experiencing at the time that I felt the urgent need to translate to the silver screen. Maybe – just maybe – if I brought this idea to cellouid, I would better understand it. I think every film I’ve done is an examination of what I was going through at the time – and Closure is no different.

Each film is a journey and each journey starts with an idea worth exploring.The journey for me started seven years ago. I was in the middle of a relationship that I was sure I needed to end, but I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. I remember the exact moment I fell out of love. It was so sudden and so swift, like getting hit with a tidal wave and your lungs filling up with water. I couldn’t breathe and I desperately needed air. Like drowning, I kept on trying to search for something to hold onto – in this case, some way I could leave the relationship – but I couldn’t find time for reason. When you’re drowning, you panic and sometimes you don’t make the best decisions, but in your head it doesn’t matter: you just need to survive. After all, as humans we all have an incredible survival instinct. It comes as natural to us as breathing air. My survival instinct told me I needed to get out of that relationship as fast as I could and in a swirling wave of confusion, anger and despair I made a decision even I didn’t fully understand.

So what I did I cling onto? It was a short story called The End, a rather quaint piece about two people named Brian and Josephine who realize they no longer care for each other. After writing the story, it helped me realize at the time I am Brian – misguided, naïve with still a lot to learn. However, writing it was immensely cathartic. It helped me realize what I did wrong. Several months after the relationship ended, I spoke with my ex for the first time. She needed to hear things I never told her when we parted ways. I had hoped afterwards she understood where I was coming from, despite how ill-advised my intentions were. I asked if this gave her any closure and she responded, “Not really, but for now it will do.”

It made me think: do we ever really get closure? Do wounds heal or do wounds simply get smaller over time, like snow melting when seasons change? Eventually, the snow dissipates, but the ground is still there. The grass and the trees are still there. I believe we simply don’t get over what happens to us – we just find a way to better deal with it. As seasons changed and time went on, I decided this was a story I needed to see take shape. It wasn’t enough for the story to exist on paper. It needed to exist in front of my eyes. I needed to look Brian right in the eyes. I needed him to feel real for me.

As life and coincidence would have it, I would find myself in another relationship when I finally turned my attention back to Closure after so many years. Without knowing it, I was right smack in the thick of it. I thought I was prepared to tell this story – after all, I’ve told stories far more grandiose before. But this story was more personal – and not before long it would get painfully more personal than any story I’ve ever done before.

Perhaps it was my subconscious trying to tell me something, but a week before filming I broke up with my partner. The feelings that I had felt when I first wrote the script forClosure all those years ago came surging back like water rushing to shore, but this time I didn’t let the water in. I watched as the water washed over me, but I closed my eyes. In order to not drown, I thought I had to forget the wave was even there.

I won’t spoil it, but there is a moment in Closure that finally forced me to open my eyes. It was a moment featuring Brian, played by my very good friend and collaborator Joel Reitsma. We were in the middle of filming a scene and there was a vulnerability in Brian’s eyes that I had seen before… because it was once dancing in the irises of my own eyes years before. I could easily recognize it – not just because of Joel’s tremendous performance and not just because it reminded me of pain that I had felt so sharply before… but because I was also experiencing it right then and there as well. I just didn’t know it.For one singular moment, I could gasp and breathe. I had looked Brian dead in the eyes and for a moment I saw myself. I saw all of the self-doubt, all the pain and the agony. I thought about running away from it, like I had before. But not this time. This time I embraced it, if only for a moment. As I watched the scene play out on the monitor, it was like taking a dip into the past. When the scene ended, I emotionally dried myself off. I realized I didn’t need to take another dip into the past again. I could open my eyes and reach the surface.

I might have been Brian at one point in my life, but that was then. This is now.I was Brian, but not anymore.

I’m not sure if I understand why people fall out of love any more than I did when I first wrote the short story seven years ago, but if anything… I understand myself better now. I’m not perfect and I will never be perfect, but life is about the journey we take, with the people who travel alongside us. Sometimes those people stay by your side until the very last chapter… and sometimes they don’t. Life is about appreciating the journey and I feel more prepared for what’s to come now than ever before. There will always be tidal waves, but the more you learn about yourself, the more you can master them. The more you can conquer them.​Like any good journey, at first I thought it was about one thing but then when it was over I realized it was about something else altogether. It wasn’t a journey of existentialism, of uncovering some artifact about human emotion… it was a journey of self-discovery. A journey to find myself.I am happy to say that I have found myself… and that is the best kind of closure I could ever ask for.​Dan MarcusWriter/Director​CLOSURE was filmed on location in Chicago, Illinois.